At Donnan Middle School, a husband and wife share same passion: mentoring those in need

Oct. 2, 2012

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Brigitte Jones-Mills and her husband, Mel, both work at Donnan Middle School, a school the state took over. / Kelly Wilkinson / the Star

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At 6 feet 4 inches and 285 pounds, Mel Mills looks every bit the defensive lineman he once was in college.

Standing in the hallway at Emma Donnan Middle School, he is an imposing physical presence. He hovers a head taller than many of the children he encounters. And his size serves him well in his role here — as peacekeeper, as hallway traffic cop, as someone teachers can call for help when they have a disruptive student.

Mills confronts kids about dress code violations (the ubiquitous untucked shirt), about why they were causing trouble in class, about whether they have a pass to be in the hallway. But despite his physical superiority, he refers to the children as Miss and Mister. It’s sincere. And there is a soothing calmness to his approach. The secret the kids are still finding out: He cares.

In Emma Donnan’s gymnasium, the other half of Team Mills is much less subtle.

Mel’s wife, Brigitte Jones-Mills, is 5 feet 10 inches and solid in her own right. But her most intimidating trait, as teacher’s assistant, is a piercing look that communicates clearly: I know what you’ve been doing, who you’ve been doing it with, what your angle is and I’m not buying it.

“If they are street and they are ‘hood,’” she says, “you have to come right at them with a bite.”

When a student is dressed sloppily, she gives a spiel about looking good on the job. Hair disheveled? Same speech. “When you go into the corporate world, you can’t wear your hair willy-nilly.” They try to move on before she is done? “Why are you walking away from me?”

There are hints that her bark is worse than her bite. A boy tells her he was late for school because he overslept, and she says tomorrow — no joking — she will bring him an alarm clock. Another says he has no clothes for gym class; she promises to bring him shorts and a T-shirt. For kids without means to wash their sweaty gear, she takes it home and throws it in her own washer. She, too, cares.

At a school where the roster of faculty and staff was wiped clean last year and where students crave connections with adults, such care can be vital.

Most of the children at Emma Donnan Middle School are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Many come from single-parent families. They often arrive with a tangle of issues from home that can spill over at school. At least one girl in the school, age 14, is pregnant this year. A handful of kids are suspected of having gang ties.

The reality is that many need someone they can talk to and tell their troubles to. In exchange, they give the listening adult license to show them the right way and hold them accountable when they stray. For the returning eighth-graders, the mentors they knew from last year were almost all gone after the state took over the perennially failing school and outsourced its management.

Trying to step into that mentor vacuum are people such as Brigitte and Mel Mills.

The Millses have been married little more than a year and have no children of their own. (Mel has two from a previous marriage living in another state.) But in various ways, the students they encounter daily are becoming their own. And they say their work at Emma Donnan is as much a ministry as a job.

Nakeisha Williams, the assistant principal at Emma Donnan, says the Millses have a nurturing way with the students.

“You can just tell,” she said, “they both have a passion and a love for children.”

* * *

For Mel Mills, the lives of many of the children he sees at Emma Donnan look familiar.

Mills, 43, grew up mostly in Detroit. His parents divorced when he was young. His mother mostly raised Mel and his siblings alone. And there were times when food was scarce and his mother went without, when there was no heat in the winter.

His uncles pushed him into sports as a diversion from the streets. He excelled in football, earning a scholarship to play for the University of Louisville. He was a member of one of the best teams in the school’s history — the 1990 squad that won 10 games and beat Alabama in the Fiesta Bowl. He also earned a degree in police administration.

His career has been a blend of football and troubled kids. He has coached at several colleges and in NFL Europe. And he has been a guard in juvenile jails and detention centers. Emma Donnan is his first job in a school. But it offers a familiar mixture: working with children who need some correction, and coaching.

In addition to monitoring the halls at Emma Donnan, he is the school’s athletic director. He is an assistant football coach at Manual High School and will help coach Emma Donnan’s football team during its season in the spring.

From his work in juvenile prisons, Mills knows where boys can wind up if they are caught up in the wrong crowd. And sometimes he uses that experience to warn the boys he encounters at Emma Donnan away from the path to prison: “I tell them I don’t wish prison or detention on anyone.”

The experience has convinced him that when it comes to children who act out, fixing the misbehavior is only a symptom to a deeper problem.

“I want to get to what’s inside the child,” he said. “I’m going to correct the behavior, but I’m not going to be so tough on the behavior that I destroy the child.”Mills said he understands what a crucial time in life middle school is for boys. That they are susceptible to the tug of gang life. That’s why he wants to funnel boys — girls, too, but particularly boys — into sports.

“We have a lot of guys in here that are athletically inclined, but their behaviors are somewhat challenging,” he said. “It is easier for them to go bad than it is to go good because their friends are bad.”

And that, Mills says, is the key: keeping the boys from getting “twisted up” in the wrong crowd.

* * *

For Brigitte Jones-Mills, 44, keeping Emma Donnan’s girls away from the wrong crowd, focused on school and not on boys, is a key part of what she sees her job to be. It’s part of the reason she was moved, after being hired to work in the front office, to become a teacher’s aide in the gym, looking after the needs of the girls. It’s also partly why she took on the task of coaching the cheerleaders.

Jones-Mills, 44, grew up in Fort Knox, Ky. She lived with her mom and two siblings in a mobile home in what essentially was a village populated by their extended family. Her grandfather, a former Marine, wouldn’t let her date or go to her prom. Church was a focal point. She wound up earning a finance degree from a business school in Kentucky. And despite some challenges, structure has been a key part of her life.

That’s a big part of what she sees missing from the lives of the girls at Emma Donnan. “They are raising themselves. They don’t have structure,” she said. “Their parents are trying to provide for them, which leads the kids to do for themselves most of the time.”

In gym class, a girl comments on Jones-Mills’ diamond ring, how she wants a big ring and someone rich enough to buy it. Jones-Mills uses it as a jumping-off point about marriage being more than just a ring, about how the girls need to study to prepare themselves for success rather than wait on a guy with cash. She warns that there are some guys who come by their cash the wrong way and that the girls need to be selective.

It’s a heavy dose of reality for a gym class discussion. She says they need it.

Jones-Mills, who broke ground as the first black cheerleader in her high school’s history, sees cheerleading as an antidote to some of the pitfalls her girls face. It gives the girls something to do after school. It teaches teamwork and discipline and hard work.

“They need an outlet,” she said. “They need somewhere to be to goof off and learn and be around other girls.”

One of the girls Jones-Mills has latched onto is 13-year-old Breia Williams, the child of a single parent and oldest of three siblings.

As an eighth-grader, Williams said she showed up at Emma Donnan this year not knowing who her allies would be. She also felt like some of the new teachers assumed she and her classmates were trouble, given the school’s tough reputation.

Then she met Jones-Mills, who not only took an interest in her but also tried to point her away from trouble. Breia (pronounced Bree-AY) became a member of the cheerleading squad. When Jones-Mills mentioned that she had no children of her own, Breia suggested that maybe she could be her goddaughter. Jones-Mills met with Williams’ mom. They agreed that Jones-Mills would have a license to challenge Breia to do well in school and stay out of trouble, maybe even spend some time with her socially.

For now, it means that Jones-Mills grills Breia if she has been sent out of class for disrupting; it’s a chastening reminder that if she wants to avoid trouble, it helps to avoid people who can get her into trouble.

“If I had never met her,” Breia said, “I would be kind of off balance.”

* * *

The partnership of Team Mills was possible only in the age of social media.

Mel and Brigitte knew each other in college when she was dating one of Mel’s teammates. They graduated and lost track of each other. In 2010, she was in Atlanta; he was in New Hampshire. She found him on Facebook.

They were both single. They talked on the phone. They Skyped. The calls became daily events. They visited over Christmas. When he took a job at a security company in Florida, she followed. On July 3, 2011, they were married on the beach in Fort Lauderdale.

They ended up in Indianapolis through a friend who introduced Mel to the Manual football coach. They hit it off.

A job offer by Charter Schools USA, the Florida company the state hired to run Emma Donnan and Manual, soon followed. Then Brigitte was hired, first as a receptionist, then moved to the gym when there was a need for a woman to work with the girls. Now, they see Brigitte’s job, along with Mel’s, as answered prayers.

The Millses new start in Indianapolis has placed them at a school also in a need of a fresh start — a school in the midst of a makeover.

So far, it’s going well.

The chaos that dominated Emma Donnan last year has still yet to reappear. That atmosphere has no doubt been aided by enrollment — the school is half as large as it was this time a year ago. And some students theorize that word that Emma Donnan was being turned into a charter school (in fact it’s being run by a charter school company but under the same rules that apply to other public schools) scared away the worst students from a year ago.

What is clear is that the new management has established a strict code of conduct that simultaneously has students complaining about the rules while also admitting that things are much calmer and safer.

Part of that has been the omnipresence of Mel Mills, the gentle giant who roams the hallways. And part of it is faculty members such as Brigitte Jones-Mills, who are reaching out to children and helping them sort out life in an urban middle school.